Don’t Starve Together is about to get shared unlocks and a Switch version

Players can carry unlocks across certain platforms

Circling back on last year’s port announcement, Klei Entertainment has confirmed the Nintendo Switch release date for Don’t Starve Together, a challenging multiplayer survival game where things go bump in the night — the Switch version lands on April 12, 2022. The studio also detailed an incoming “shared unlocks” feature for current players.

There’s quite a bit to dig into, but the feature boils down to carrying your Don’t Starve Together character skins, recipes, and other unlocks “across participating platforms,” which in this case translates to Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, Steam, and WeGame, but not PS4 — at least not yet. As Klei explains, “the requirements to get [shared unlocks] on to PlayStation are more than a studio our size can handle for such a service.”

“We have been preparing for this for a long time and now that we have several platforms ready to participate, we decided to move forward,” said Klei. “We understand that this is going to be very disappointing for some players and we want you to know that if/when we can make this happen for you, we will implement it as soon as we possibly can.”

When the time comes (the current estimate is “soon”), Don’t Starve Together players can “merge multiple platform accounts onto a single Klei Account and seamlessly use your items on everything connected. This includes crockpot recipes, plant registry, item skins, and characters that you gained through drops including woven characters and skins.”

Asked about possible duplicate character skins after merging player accounts, a developer said that there will be dupes, but there’s going to be a “deduplicator (useful for all accounts but especially merged ones) to eliminate excess loyal items.”

The topic of full-on cross-play for Don’t Starve Together also came up, and that’s something Klei “would love to do.” At the moment, though, the task is too resource-intensive.

The Switch trailer from December is still worth a watch if you haven’t kept up with Don’t Starve Together. It’s a popular game to this day — there are 8,000-some concurrent players on Steam right now as I write this article, putting the game just behind Total War: Warhammer III, Sea of Thieves, and Cookie Clicker. I never got very far, even if I tally up all of my various attempts, so much of the footage is new to me. What an interesting world.

Jordan Devore

Jordan is a founding member of Destructoid and poster of seemingly random pictures. They are anything but random.